1. Technical Field
The disclosed embodiments relate in general to systems and methods for video content processing in connection with video conferencing and video broadcast applications and, more specifically, to systems and methods for real-time efficient navigation of multiple video conferencing and video broadcast streams.
2. Description of the Related Art
Modern real-time group video conferencing systems well known to persons of ordinary skill in the art enable two or more users to engage in audio/video conferencing using audio and video streams sent over a computer network. During such conference, a computer screen of each conference participant is typically split into portions each showing a live stream from one of the conference participants with the total number of shown live streams being equal to the total number of conference participants. Conventional systems enable the conference participants to momentarily share their screen with others, for example to show a demo of a product, a web site, a deck of slides, or a document such as a PDF or a text editor file.
As illustrated in FIG. 1, in one exemplary scenario, a conference participant may decide to show her face in a screen 101, share her word document in a screen 102, switch back to showing her face in screen 103, and later show her screen where she types code in an editor in screen 104. Unlike text-based chat systems in which a person can readily scroll the chat window to refer to earlier parts of a transcript, participants in a video conference can only see the live frames. Stream recorders that record live conferencing sessions only let people record the streams for later viewing, but do not offer real-time navigation into the streams. Therefore, unfortunately, using the conventional conferencing technology, conference participants cannot review previous video frames in the live video stream: they can only see what their peers are sharing at the moment. This leads to decreased usability and user experience.
Therefore, the conventional video conferencing systems are deficient due to their lack of video stream navigation functionality. Thus, new and improved systems and methods are needed that would enable users to efficiently jump back into semantically meaningful parts of conference streams shared by their peers.